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Nancy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The officer never asked me where I’d been. Lovely young lady, she was. Had very pretty nails.’ Nancy looked around her. ‘Ask Jean yourself – she’s at home.’
Kim nodded and started walking up the path.
She knocked, and a woman around ten years younger than Nancy answered the door.
Her face lit up as though any interruption was a welcome distraction from whatever she was doing.
She looked from one to the other.
Kim and Bryant held up their identifications.
‘May we ask you about the teenager that went missing approximately ten years ago?’
‘Of course. We still remember it, don’t we, Nancy?’ she called out to the woman making her way up the path. ‘We were stood here, gassing. Saw the boy come tearing out of the woods and carried on riding up the hill.’
‘You didn’t see a van over the road in the layby?’
Jean shook her head emphatically. ‘There was no van. Not while we were out here. I’m a woman alone, Officer – have been for fifteen years. You think I don’t take notice of strange vehicles parked up opposite my house?’
Kim was finding it hard to doubt her word.
‘You saw the boy come out on the bike? No pausing, no hesitation, he just carried on riding?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly it.’
‘Okay, thanks for your time,’ Kim said.
‘You coming in for a cuppa, Nance?’ Jean asked.
‘Don’t mind if I do, if they’ve finished with me,’ she said.
‘Thank you for your time,’ Kim said, relieved that the walk back to the car would be a little bit quicker.
The door closed and Kim was about to say something when her phone rang.
‘Go ahead, Stace.’
‘Boss, I’m gonna need you to go somewhere if you’re free.’
‘Two minutes. We’re just heading back to the car.’
Kim took a final look back at the woods. There was a distance of twenty metres or so from the edge of the woods and the place Josh said the van had been pulling away from. That twenty-metre gap was right opposite where the two women had been standing.
They hadn’t seen Bradley exit on his bike and they hadn’t seen any white van, which begged the question.
What if he’d never left the woods at all?
FIFTY-TWO
Will Deakin had lost the deer-in-the-headlights look that she’d seen on his face when first informed of his wife’s murder. Now he greeted them with empty, tired eyes.
‘Officer, you must be psychic,’ he said, offering a weak attempt at humour. ‘I was just about to call you.’
‘Is your daughter home?’ Kim asked, stepping into the house.
He nodded towards the stairs.
‘Yeah, got her music going, but there’s something I want to show you,’ he said, heading towards the kitchen.
